Your career action plan! ✨

Not sure where to go after graduation? Need to start being focused on the kind of achievement you want at your workplace?

Enter the career action plan, a roadmap that will guide you in your career planning for you to achieve success as determined by you. Why is a career action plan important? Think of it as a map where your destination is a success. Imagine if you are on a road trip. Without a map, you have no idea where you’re heading and waste all that time just rounding and rounding and ultimately getting nowhere!

Which is what can happen to your career without a career action plan. Without it, you tend to just drift along, taking each day as it comes. Before you know it, your peers are progressing in their career and you’re still at the starting point, trying to figure it out!

While it’s important to draft out a career action plan even before you start work, there’s no hard rules on when it will come in handy. Maybe it’s a promotion you’re after, a career action plan will help you determine how to best get there in the timeframe you’ve set for yourself. Or maybe you want to change careers. A career action plan will jot down what you need to do to find this new career, how you can get your foot in and ultimately be great at it!

What needs to be in a career action plan? Here are five important steps to it.

1. Consider where you are now
Examine your current situation. Does it match your job aspirations? Or maybe you just graduated. The next obvious thing to do is to find a job. For the former, in this step you need to decide if where you are currently in your job makes you feel fulfilled or satisfied. If you’ve just left the university world, then it’s time to decide if you want to start working or maybe further your education.

2. Decide where you want to be
So you’ve determined exactly where you are in your career journey. Now, what do you want to do next? You may want to think of new possibilities in your current job – whether it is a new role you want or maybe a heads up in your journey, especially if you feel like you need to push yourself more in your current role. Say you want a promotion, then obviously the next place you want to be is to be in a more senior role taking on a bigger portfolio. If you just graduated, then it’s time to list down the roles and companies you envision yourself to be working for.

3. Plan how to get there
Did no. 1 and 2? Now it’s time to put all that into a roadmap on how you want to achieve them! This is where you decide on a strategy on how to achieve your career aims. It can be something as simple as wanting to remain focused in your current role. Then your plan would be to continue learning and being better at what you are currently doing.

The aim is to set the scene and provide an overview on what you intend to do to achieve that aim. Think SMART goals – be SPECIFIC about the outcome, set goals that are MEASURABLE and ACHIEVABLE, make sure it is RELEVANT to your career aims (want a promotion? Want a new role?) and give yourself a TIME on when you will complete this by.

For example, say you want to be Team Leader in two years. Your action would be to discuss this with your manager and work on your strengths and weaknesses. By mid year, plan to have a review again to see how far you’ve come. Then by end of 2023, talk to your manager again to properly identify other personal and professional development targets you need to meet so you can achieve this goal by 2024!

4. Take action
All that planning… now it’s time to implement it! Say you are a new graduate looking for a job. Give yourself a timeframe on when you want to land a first role. Plan who you want to interview for, do your research and start looking out for the roles that are suitable. Reflect on your plan as you go about it – do you need to tweak it or is it something that needs to be changed completely? Remember, even if your endgame is specific, there are numerous ways to get there so you need to be flexible in how you plan to achieve your goals.

A tip? Write down the exact goals you want to achieve each month. Every time you’ve achieved it, tick it off and go to the next one on the list. This way, you are focused on what to achieve – just like a map of success!

5. Review your progress
Think road trip again – you follow the map but is it really getting you to your destination? Same as your career action plan. You’ve set out the steps on what to achieve and are already accomplishing them. How far off are you from realising your success? Are your current goals still relevant or have things changed and there are better ways to achieve your success? It’s important to review your progress and not just charge ahead without taking a breather to see how you may be doing. Think of it as a learning opportunity to review your career action plan accordingly to how you can best achieve your career dreams.

Photo by Brett Jordan Unsplash